Chapter XXXI - Origin of the Chinese

Having now derived some definite notions of how the Chinese
advanced from the patriarchal to the feudal, from the submissive
and monarchical to the emulous and democratic, finally to collapse
under the overpowering grasp of a single Dictator or Despot, whose
centralized system in the main, still survives; having also seen
how the nucleus of China proper was encompassed on three sides by
Tibetans, Tartars, Tunguses, Coreans, and by various ill-defined
tribes to the south; let us see if there is any evidence whatever
to show, or even to suggest to us, whence the orthodox Chinese
originally came, and who they were.

First and foremost, it seems primarily unnecessary to suggest at
all that they came from anywhere; for, if the position be once
assumed as an axiom that all people must have immigrated from some
place to the place in which we first find them, or hear of them,
then the double question arises: “Why should the persons we find
in A., and who, we think, may have come from B., not have migrated
from A. to B. before they migrated back from B. to A.?” Or: “If
the people we find at A. must have come from B., whence did the
people at B. come, before they went to A.?” To put it in another
way: given the existence 4000 or 5000 years ago of Chinese in
China, Egyptians in Egypt, and Babylonians in Babylonia–why
should one group be assumed to be older than the other? The only
ground for suggesting that these groups had not each a separate
evolution, is the assumption that man was “created” once for all,
and created summarily; in which case it follows with mathematical
precision that the ultimate ancestry of every man living extends
back to exactly the same date. That is to say, the highest and the
lowest, the blackest and the whitest, only differ in this, that
some men began to keep records earlier than others; for the man
who keeps no records loses track of his ancestors, and that is
all. Not to mention other races, some of our own noblest English
families trace back their ancestry to a favoured or successful
person, who was of no hereditary distinction before he distinguished
himself; whilst on the other hand the tramp and the street-walker
may have as “royal” blood in their veins as any lineal princely personage.
It is records, therefore, that differentiate “civilized” from uncivilized
people, blue blood from plebeian; and as we see millions of people
living without records to-day in various parts of the world,
notwithstanding that for centuries, or even for millenniums, they
have been surrounded by or in immediate contact with neighbours
possessing records, it seems to follow that a nation’s greatness may
begin at any time, independently of the blueness of its blood, the
robustness of its warriors, the beauty of its women; that is, whenever
it chooses to keep records, and thus to cultivate itself: for records are
nothing more than the means of keeping experiences in stock,
instead of having to repeat them every day; they are thus
accumulations of national wealth. It by no means follows that
because records can be traced back farther in the case of one
nation than in the case of another, that the first nation is older
than the other; for instance, although in the West our various
alphabets appear to refer themselves back to one same source, or
to a few sources which probably all hark back ultimately to one
and the same, there seems no reason to believe that the Chinese
did not independently invent, develop, and perfect their own
scheme of written records: the mere fact that we learnt how to
write is some evidence in support of the proposition that they
also, being men like ourselves, learnt how to write.

There is no documentary evidence for the barest existence of
ancient China, or of any part of it, which is not to be found in
the Chinese records, and in them alone; no nation anywhere near
China has any record or tradition of either its own or of China’s
existence at a period earlier than the Chinese records indicate.
Those records do not contain the faintest allusion to Egypt,
Babylonia, India, or any other foreign country or place whatever
outside the extremely limited area of the Central Nucleus, and the
larger area occupied by the semi-Chinese colonial powers
surrounding it. Nor is there the faintest evidence that the
Biblical “land of Sinim” had any reference to China, which seems
to have been as absolutely unknown to the West previous to, say,
250 B.C., as America was unknown to Europe, or Europe to America
previous to 1400 A.D. If any ideas were derived from China by the
West, or from the West by China, the records of both China and the
West alike point, however, to one obvious connecting link, and
that is, the horse-riding nomads of the north, who are now, it is
true, in some parts a little more settled than they used to be,
and who have been tamed in various degrees by dogmatic religions
unknown to them in ancient times, but who remain in many respects
now very much what they were 3000 years ago. Of course pedlars,
hawkers, and even long-course caravans travelled, whenever the
routes were free, from place to place in ancient times as they do
now; but it is exceedingly improbable that there would be any
through-travellers from Europe to China, except one or two
occasional waifs or adventurers buffeted through by chance. If 600
years ago, Marco Polo’s through-route adventures were regarded in
Europe as almost incredible, notwithstanding the then recent and
well-trodden war-path of the Mongol armies, what chances are there
of through-travel 2000 years before that? And, even if a rare case
occasionally occurred, what chances are there of any one recording
it?

The probability is, so far as sane experience takes us, that the
Chinese had been exactly where we first find them for many
thousand years, or even for myriads of years, before their own
traditions begin. With the exception of the discovery of America,
which brought a flood of strangers into a strange land, and
speedily exterminated the aborigines, there do not appear to be
any authenticated instances in history of extensive and robust
populations being entirely displaced like flocks of sheep by
others. Any one who travels widely in China can see for himself
that, wherever unassimilated tribes live in complete or partial
independence, and, a fortiori, where the assimilation has
been carried out, all those tribes possess at least this point in
common with the original Chinese or the assimilated speakers of
Chinese–that their language is monosyllabic, uninflected, not
agglutinative, and tonic; i.e. that each word is “sung” in a
particular way, besides being pronounced in a particular way.
Probably those tribes before they were absorbed, or, despite their
not having yet been absorbed by the Chinese, had been there as
long as the Chinese had been in the contiguous Chinese parts. It
seems reasonable to suppose that the Chinese would absorb their
own race-classes more readily than they would absorb Tartars,
Japanese, and Coreans, all of whom belong to the same dissyllabic,
long-worded, agglutinative family. And so it is: the Chinese
followed the lines of least resistance (after themselves becoming
cultured) and worked their way down the rivers and other
watercourses towards what we call South China. From the very
first, their passage northwards across the Yellow River was
contested by the Tartars, whom they have since partly driven back,
and partly (with great effort) absorbed. They have never been able
to assimilate the Coreans, not to say the Japanese, though both
peoples took very kindly to Chinese civilization after our
Christian era, when first friendly missions began to be
interchanged. Indo-China contains many more of the monosyllabic
and tonic tribes than of others; if, indeed, there are any at all
of the dissyllabic and non-tonal classes; and the Chinese have no
difficulty in merging themselves with Annamese, Tonquinese,
Cambodgians, Siamese, Shans, Thos, Laos, Mons, and such like
peoples: but their own administrative base is too far north; the
conditions of food and climate in Indo-China are not quite
favourable for the marching of armies, especially when it is
remembered that the best troops used have always been Tartars,
used to warm clothes and heating food. There have, besides, always
been rival Indian religion, rival Indian colonization, rival
Indian language, and rival Indian trade influence to contend with.
No absorption of Indian races has ever been anywhere effected by
China. Tibetans never came into question in ancient times; if they
were known, it could only have been to Shuh (Sz Ch’wan) and Ts’in
or early Chou (Shen Si).

If it had not been the Chinese of Ho Nan who first used records,
it is just as probable that the tonic and monosyllabic absorption
which, as things were and are, moved from north to south, might
have moved from south to north. During the Chou dynasty (1122
B.C.-222 B.C.), when the extension of the Chinese race took place
(which had probably already for long gone on) in the clear light
of history, it will be noticed that the rulers of all the great
colony nations of the south–Ts’u, Wu, and Yueeh–had, in turn, to
remind the Emperor of China of their perfect equality with him in
spiritual claim and ancient descent; of their connection with
dynasties precedent to his; of times when his ancestor was a mere
vassal like themselves. No Tartars of those times ever put forth
claims like these, though, it is true, in much later times some of
the (non-Turkish) Tartar rulers of North China traced their
ancestors back to the mythical Chinese emperors who reigned in
Shan Tung. Again, the founder of the Hia dynasty (2205 B.C.) is
repeatedly said to have been buried at modern Shao-hing (between
Hangchow and Ningpo), and the King of Yueeh even sacrificed to him
there. So the Emperor Shun, the predecessor and patron of the same
founder, was traditionally buried near Ch’ang-sha in modern Hu Nan
province. The First August Emperor included both these “lions” in
his pleasure tours among the great sights of China. No sound
historical deduction, of course, can be drawn from these
traditions, however persistent: if false, they were, at any rate,
open to the criticism of a revolutionary and all-powerful Emperor
over 2000 years ago, and to a second, almost equally powerful, who
visited both places a century later; the suggestion inevitably
follows from the existence of these traditions in the south that
either the cultured Chinese whom we first find in Ho Nan had moved
northwards from Hu Nan, Kiang Si, and the lake districts
generally, before they spread themselves backwards; or that the
uncultured Chinese had moved north before the cultured Chinese
moved south; or that both north and south Chinese were at first
equally cultured, until within historical times the north Chinese
(i.e. in Ho Nan, along the Yellow River) so perfected their system
of records that they carried all before them. After all there is
no strain on the imagination in suggesting this, for early Western
civilization grew up in the same way.

There is not the smallest hint of any immigration of Chinese from
the Tarim Valley, from any part of Tartary, from India, Tibet,
Burma, the Sea, or the South Sea Islands: in fact, there is no
hint of immigration from anywhere even in China itself, except as
above hypothetically described. There the Chinese are, and there
they were; and there is an end to the question, so far as
documentary evidence goes. Of course, the persistent Tarim Valley
scheme proposed is only a means to get in the thin end of the
wedge, in order to drive home the thick end in the shape of a
definite start from the Tower of Babel, and an ultimate reference
to the Garden of Eden. If there are still people who believe it
their duty on Scriptural principle to accept this naive Western
origin of the Chinese, there is no reason why religious belief or
imagination should not be perfectly respected, and even find a
working compromise with the principle of strict adherence to human
evidence. If supernatural agencies be once admitted (as the
limited human intellect understands Nature), there seems to be no
more reason for accepting the creation of a complete whale
(already a hundred years old, according to the growth period of
later whales), than for accepting the creation of complete men
with 1000 years’ history behind them instead of 100; or that of
the earth with 20,000, or even 20,000,000 years’ history behind
it, and even before it; for as the first whale, or pair of whales,
must set the standard of natural history for all future whales, so
the man created with history behind him may equally well have
history created in front of him. “Nature,” according to the
imperfect human understanding, is no more outraged in one case
than in the other, nor can mere time or size count as anything
towards increasing our wonder when we tell ourselves what
supernatural things unseen powers superior to ourselves may have
done. This amounts to the same thing as saying that dogmatic
belief, personal religious conviction, agnosticism, superstition,
and imagination are all on equal terms, and are equally
respectable factors when confronted with human historical
evidence, so long as they are kept rigidly apart from the latter,
As an eminent Catholic has recently said: “The Church has no more
reason to be afraid of modern science than it was of ancient
science.” In other words, however pious and religious a man may be
(as we understand the words in Europe), there is no reason why, as
a recreation apart from his faith, he should not rigidly adhere to
the human evidence of history so far as it goes. On the other
hand, however sceptical and discriminating a man may be, from the
point of view of imperfect human knowledge, in the admittance of
humanly proved fact, there is no reason why, from the emotional
and imaginative side of his existence, he should not rigidly
subscribe to dogma or personal conviction, whether the abstract
idea of virtue, the concrete idea of love for some cherished human
being, or the yearning for some supernatural state of sinlessness
be concerned. A distinguished financier, for instance, may regale
his imagination with socialistic dreams of a perfect Utopia; but,
when the weekly household bills are presented to him, he deals
with overcharges in pence like any other practical individual.

From one point of view, the Chinese, already provided with their
tonic language at the Confusion of Tongues, marched to the Yellow
River, where we find them. From the other, there is no evidence
whatever to connect the Chinese with any people other than those
we find near them now, and which have from the earliest times been
near them; no evidence that their language, their civilization,
their manners, ever received anything from, or gave anything to,
India, Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, or Greece, except so far as has
been suggested above, or will be suggested below.